We already knew about the economic crisis, the mass unemployment, the riots. But this summer we saw the tensions and turmoil of a nation erupt in a single act of startling violence on a morning television program. Within days, it was beamed around the world. Chris Heath uncovers the truth of what happened in that TV studio, a cautionary tale not just for the future of Greece but for the rest of us, too

It is a short video clip. No matter how many times you watch it, it seems impossible to believe that the same train-wreck chain of actions and reactions, flying water and fists, could possibly happen, though of course it does.

The participants, seated in an arc, are arguing. They are arguing in a language you don’t understand. In the center is a man who clearly should be moderating the conversation, though he appears to have little control over what is going on. The panelists talk over one another, as though the faster and louder you say something the truer it becomes.

Then, far to the moderator’s left, an animated blonde woman says something that clearly riles a short-haired young man on the opposite end. This lurch—from heated debate to something much crazier—happens in a flash. The short-haired man picks up his glass of water and, rising to his feet, throws its contents in the blonde woman’s face. It’s a direct hit. She seems to freeze, but after that it’s all so fast, so frantic. A dark-haired older woman, sitting between the water-thrower and the moderator, gets up from her chair and jabs the aggressor with her newspaper. The short-haired man lunges toward her, then swings violently at her. A right, a left, a right. Each time, he connects. You can’t believe how fast he moves, how hard he hits. Then the screen goes blank.

The clip is from a popular Greek morning TV show that was broadcast live on June 7, 2012, ten days before Greece’s second election of the year amid the ongoing economic turmoil. The three key participants are all members of the Greek Parliament. Though the incident took place toward the end of a ninety-minute TV debate, a widely circulated form of the clip is just over a minute long, and it looks like the winning entry to a filmmaking competition with a single rule:

Illustrate, as vividly as you can, the premise _This is what it looks like when a society begins to fall apart. _

"Fuck ’em all. They’re all idiots. We’re all idiots."

Election day: June 17, 2012. The speaker is a restaurant owner in the backstreets of central Athens; a couple enjoying a late lunch have tipped him over the edge by casually asking what he thinks about it all. What he thinks is that he won’t be voting. "I don’t give a fuck," he says. "They’re all fucking criminals. I’m so embarrassed, because I love my country and those bastards have torn it to shreds."

Greece is in trouble. The economy is in free fall. (In January, CNN declared that the Greek economy was now worth less than Apple.) Unemployment is soaring. (Over half of the workforce under 25 is now unemployed.) Suicide rates, historically some of the world’s lowest, have reportedly doubled. Civil unrest is growing, and occasionally there are riots.

One disquieting symptom has been the recent surge of support for a previously obscure right-wing party called Golden Dawn, which has deftly exploited the vacuum created by a mounting disillusionment with old-school Greek politicians. Golden Dawn’s signature policy is its stance against immigration and against immigrants. In some urban areas its members offer what some see as necessary security and protection for beleaguered Greek citizens and what others see as vigilantism. Golden Dawn is routinely described as neo-Nazi, a description its members disavow, though they certainly seem to flirt with Nazi imagery: It’s very hard to believe that the party’s logo, a Greek symbol known as a meander, wasn’t chosen for its uncanny resemblance to a swastika.

Golden Dawn’s emergence in May’s election was widely dismissed as the accidental side effect of a reckless protest vote, and there was some belief that in this second election, now that the electorate was more familiar with its policies, the Golden Dawn vote would collapse. Not so. As I sit in a bar this evening watching the election results come in, the bar’s TV screen is filled with the face of Nikos Michaloliakos, Golden Dawn’s leader, a weathered overweight man looking unmistakably smug. Though the party has gotten only 7 percent of the vote, it cements Golden Dawn as a player on the Greek political scene. One of its parliamentarians is the short-haired guy with the swinging arms, now newly famous for hitting a woman three times on live TV. His name is Ilias Kasidiaris, and tonight’s vote means that he has just been reelected.

The blonde woman struck in the face by Kasidiaris with the glass of water is named Rena Dourou. Her party, the untested leftist coalition Syriza, came up just shy of getting the largest share of the vote tonight after facing a sustained campaign suggesting that its policies are naive and will force Greece to leave the euro, causing further economic catastrophe. (Tonight’s notional victor is one of Greece’s older political parties, New Democracy; I watch on television as its leader delivers the kind of low-key victory speech you give when you’ve barely won 29 percent of the vote in a time of crisis. One of the drinkers next to me shouts, "Stick it up your ass.")

A few days later, when I meet with Dourou, who was reelected along with her Golden Dawn assailant, she complains bitterly about the scare tactics faced by her party and Syriza’s charismatic young leader, Alexis Tsipras. "Sometimes it was quite ridiculous. The only thing they didn’t say was that Tsipras will fuck your woman." She apologizes for her English, comparing it to that of a kamaki. Kamaki—the word literally means "harpoon"—is the name given to the Greek men who seduce female English-speaking tourists with a stereotypically comical and simplistic patter. "Okay, me, you, beautiful, go to bed together," she offers as an example.

It used to be a point of political principle for Dourou to use public transport whenever she could, but she explains how that option is no longer available to her. Too many people approach her these days, some to congratulate her, some to express their hostility. This, to her frustration, is not because of her policies. It is because of what happened live on Greek TV on the morning of June 7. To her, the event’s fame has become a distracting sideshow, a piece of irrelevant titillation.

"To be honest," she says, "the only thing that really makes me angry was that for days after, this fucking five-second part of the show was repeated in every media and social media. The guy threw the water and this video played even in Tokyo."

In Tokyo, and in every far-flung place where that video was watched, it seemed pretty easy to pinpoint the villain of the piece as Golden Dawn’s Ilias Kasidiaris. But in Greece, incredibly, this was open to debate. Were there reasons why, in these strange and tense and crucial times, such behavior could be excusable? Some thought so.

Supporters of Greece’s New Democracy Party at a pre-election rally in May.

Maris, a middle-aged Golden Dawn supporter, offers one set of justifications to me. To begin with, he suggests, the setup had been unfair to Kasidiaris. "They put two ladies against someone who is very young," he argues. And as for the two women, Maris suggests that they relinquished any privileges of gender by the vigorous manner in which they engaged in the debate: Women who talk like that don’t really count as women. "If the woman likes to be a man, then you have to treat her like she is a man. If a woman is like a woman, you treat her like a woman."

Given that one out of fourteen voting adults I pass in the street voted for Golden Dawn, it has been surprisingly hard to find a rank-and-file Golden Dawn supporter who would speak with me. I think I have pinned down a seemingly willing bus driver, but on the day we are supposed to meet, his cell phone is turned off, and he never answers my calls again. I find Maris by accident, after a conversation about soccer (the great English-language leveler in Greece) mutates into a diatribe about how Golden Dawn has "cleaned" Maris’s neighborhood—"...It happens that we are foreigners in our own country.... Soon 50 percent of Europe will be Muslim...."—and how people now have someone to turn to. Maris is a taxi driver, and he tells me that when he finishes work the following night, he will take me on a tour of the neighborhoods Golden Dawn is saving, to show me what he is talking about. He makes this sound more like a challenge than a promise, but I agree.

In the offices of the Greek Communist Party, inside the Greek Parliament building, Liana Kanelli—the second of the women from that video—lights the first of the seven Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes she will smoke in front of me and explains the contradiction between the role she inhabits now and the life she has lived. Before she was in politics, Kanelli, 58, was well-known in Greece as a journalist and TV presenter. "My nickname for years was Christiane Amanpour of Greece, Barbara Walters of Greece, Oprah of Greece," she says. "I belong to a party that does not work with the idea of personalities, so it’s a burden on my shoulders now."

Politics is different here. Communism isn’t some terrifyingly arcane and extreme philosophy that exists on the far end of the political map; the Communist Party has held a significant minority presence in the Greek Parliament for decades. And Kanelli talks the talk with gusto, detailing how in modern society there is a "brotherhood of darkness" that serves big money. "If we carry on like this, we’re going to—permit the phrase, I’m not afraid to say it—we’re going to fuck ourselves as a society." (Political discourse, I already feel able to declare, is saltier and less guarded here.)

The most likely future Kanelli sees involves political instability here and elsewhere in Europe, followed by the imposition of extreme measures to unify Europe. She says that there will be an emperor and that the government of countries like Greece will be vassals. "We’re going back to medieval times," she predicts. "I will be proven right, like I have been thirty-six years. Breathing with my people here. I’m breathing with Greece. I live inside them. So I know."

In the past, Kanelli has been portrayed as very anti-American, but she presents it differently. "I love the American people," she says. "I love their freedom of spirit. I might despise politics, imperialism, everything, but I love the American people. I wish I had one chance in my life on the road like Kerouac." She rhapsodizes about Johnny Cash, and William Burroughs, and Arthur Miller, and she tells me that in many ways America, as a modern melting pot of different cultures, sets a better example "than old dying Europe" of what a society should be. "We have been a melting pot, of ideas and everything, and we’re turning ourselves back into the dictatorship of white men."

In a certain way she is clearly something of a romantic, but she is also practical about what it is to live a life like hers now in a country like Greece. At home Kanelli has two guns; she has had a gun permit for the past eighteen years "because of Nazi fascists that run after me." And then she shows me the fading blemish that remains from one of the blows that Ilias Kasidiaris rained upon her on the morning of June 7.

I ask her whether she had ever before, in her whole life, been hit by a man in that way.

"No," she says.

As I sit in the front passenger seat of an off-duty taxi, heading into the suburb of Agios Panteleimonas as the clock ticks toward midnight, Maris offers his own potted history of recent Greek immigration: the borders opening in 1991 and the Greek population welcoming the first wave; an influx of Albanian prisoners who caused trouble; a secondary wave from Pakistan and Bangladesh, then Afghanistan, Algeria, and Morocco—people who were in transit and as a result cared little about the law. He says that no one helped with immigrant criminality until Golden Dawn appeared on the streets. If someone wants to go to the bank, they call for a Golden Dawn escort. "Suddenly," Maris says, "the people believed they had someone that was looking out for them."

As we near his home, he says that he has a 23-year-old daughter and that he doesn’t allow her to walk around after 9:30 P.M. "In the neighborhood where I was born," he emphasizes. When he parks his car at night—"even me, an ex-special forces** **guy"—he carries a knife with him as he walks home.

He points to three African men talking on a corner. To me, they appear to be laughing about something funny.

"Selling the women," he says. "Others with drugs. Waiting for junkies."

Isn’t it possible, I ask, that they’re just friends enjoying a joke?

He won’t have it. I quiz him on the darker stories about Golden Dawn and the violence ascribed to it. He deflects my questions for a while, then says, "Answer me—if Golden Dawn was very gentle and smiling, you think it would have 7 percent?"

We circle through different neighborhoods as Maris tries to convey to me the horror he sees and the anger he feels and the hope that the rising political force of Golden Dawn has given him. He seems genuinely interested that I see things so differently. Eventually he brings me back to my hotel and suggests that we sit outside while he smokes. He asks me to turn off my recorder, and that’s when he quite amiably launches into the tale of an international Jewish conspiracy centered around George Soros and Macedonia. When I explain why I consider such conspiracy theories both implausible and a little ugly, he appears fascinated by my naïveté, maybe even a bit concerned for my well-being in a world I evidently understand so little of.

_Stills from the incident on live television, Kasidiaris at

left with back turned._

"Okay," says Ilias Kasidiaris, "let’s start."

One morning, after many days of prevaricating about his availability, the politician whose televised violence has made him the famous new face of Golden Dawn agrees to meet. He sits at a right angle from me, on a sofa in the back room of Golden Dawn’s parliamentary offices, wearing a crisply ironed white shirt and gray trousers, and much of the time he faces directly forward, either out of formality, comfort, disinterest, or because in some way I am not quite worth looking at. He speaks fairly good English and says that he will listen to my questions in English and reply in Greek. (My translator relays the answers to me.) He seems impatient that we should get this over with.

Kasidiaris says that his father is a doctor, his mother a teacher, and that he joined Golden Dawn when he left school. Away from politics, he specializes in food chemistry—"I always liked it," he says—and has his own company that helps manufacturers check the quality of foodstuffs to international regulatory standards.

But, I ask, you always wanted to be a politician?

What happens next establishes a pattern throughout our conversation. Ninety-five percent of his answers will be in Greek, but when he wants to state something with particular emphasis, he switches to English.

"I am not a politician," he says.

When I ask him what he is, he reverts to Greek.

"I am a member of the National Party, Golden Dawn, and I am fighting for the national independence of my country. It is not honorable for me to call myself a politician. I grew up with the slogan ‘All politicians are traitors.’ Many things need to be changed before being called a politician is honorable."

I quiz him on Golden Dawn’s two central policy areas. The first: get rid of the bailout agreement, usually referred to here as "the memorandum," in which to avoid bankruptcy Greece has accepted billions of dollars that come with harsh and widely resented conditions. Golden Dawn imagines a Greece of abundant natural resources (the consensus of economists is otherwise) and a country that will eventually abandon the euro on principle and return to the drachma ("our national currency"). His second Golden Dawn creed: "Get rid of the immigrants; find a solution about illegal immigration." He says that European law has allowed "Greece to become a garbage place" and suggests that if I walk around Athens’s main streets, "you will be a victim of immigrants." I point out that I have done a fair amount of walking and, so far, been the victim of no one; he retreats to more fundamental tenets. "The philosophy is that this belongs to Greeks. We don’t want illegal immigrants to exist in our towns, in our cities."

I suggest that such opposition to immigration often sounds like thinly disguised racism.

"Because you are an American," he replies, "I would like to suggest to you that most of the immigrants that exist here in Greece are coming from Afghanistan. From the war that was a result of U.S. politics. They are not Taliban—they have been persecuted by the Taliban. So my suggestion is that these refugees should go to the U.S., as the South Vietnamese did a few decades ago. There’s no sense of racism in my suggestion."

He seems very satisfied by this answer.

When I ask him about one of the words frequently used in relation to Golden Dawn, _Nazi, _he replies, "We are the Greek nationalist movement—we are not Nazis." Still, when I ask him whether he has any interest in, or sympathy with, Nazi philosophy, he seems quite happy to discuss the matter. "Historically, we studied all the periods of politics and history around the world," he begins. "Regarding World War II, we have different ideas than has been written."

I ask his opinion of what Hitler was doing in Germany.

"With the social system in Germany back then, there are many issues that were the right way to do it. His social strategy. Especially the favor of the working class and the development of the middle class."

So does he think, overall, that Hitler was a good man or a bad man?

"This will be judged by history," he answers, "many many years from now."

I point out that most people are happy to make the judgment now.

"I say again, this will be judged by the historians some years from now."

We discuss his TV eruption. He appears comfortable and confident that his behavior did neither him nor his party any harm. "What I saw," says Kasidiaris, "was that the public was in favor and accepted my actions." He offers a brief, cold, smug smile. "For sure we didn’t lose many votes." Kasidiaris appears amused that all the participants in the TV incident must now coexist in this same parliamentary building. I ask what will happen if they all meet in the parliamentary café.

"We will not meet in the café," he says with a smirk. "We will meet in the wrestling ring."

Golden Dawn seems to be in a moment where nothing bad sticks to it. Here in Parliament its members gain equally whether the other parties snub them (they can present themselves as populist martyrs) or whether they are accepted (their views are normalized). And its blunt talk of endemic parliamentary corruption and a self-serving political elite strikes a chord with a far wider Greek population than those who voted for its candidates. Kasidiaris’s smugness seems to me of that youthful kind where you know you’re making everything up as you go along and yet somehow it still feels as though it’s all going precisely to plan.

I ask him whether he wishes he had acted differently on TV.

"No," he says, "I don’t regret my actions."

Some, I suggest, would say that whatever the circumstances, it is never right for a man to hit a woman.

"I agree with that," he replies. "We can hit women with roses. At that moment I didn’t have any roses with me."

Sometime after 3 A.M. on June 11, 2012, as Monday slipped into Tuesday in the port suburb of Perama, the occupants of a pink-walled house with green shutters on Soufouli Street were awoken by a sudden commotion. They quickly realized that they were under attack. They could hear a mob—later they would estimate that there were twenty of them—shouting and swearing, banging on the front door and smashing its glass, breaking through the wooden shutters.

The three Abuhammid brothers—Achmed, Mohammed, and Saad—had lived here for about twelve years. They had arrived in Greece nearly twenty years ago from Egypt, after a treaty was established that eased the ability of workers from either country to work in the other. People working near their town, Rashid, in the Nile Delta, had already come over, and word went round that a fisherman could earn more money here. After a while, they set up a fish shop near the port. Sardines and anchovies were the bedrock of their business. Over the years, they’d come to feel very safe here. They didn’t even always lock the front door, though thank goodness they did on this night.

Greek demonstrators clash with police.

The attackers almost forced one window open at the front of the house; all that kept it shut was one brother holding it from the inside. Though the glass of the door was smashed, the steel frame held. Then the mob started throwing rocks at the house.

"Come outside and we’ll show you!" they shouted.

Achmed threw a wooden piece of his bed out the window at them and shouted as loudly as he could that the others should get the knife and the gun. (It was a bluff. The Egyptians didn’t have a gun.) Eventually the mob backed off, though not before smashing up a car and a van belonging to the Egyptians. The brothers waited for a few moments, worried that the attackers hadn’t really left, then went out into the street.

They never had much doubt who was responsible. Things had been changing recently. For most of their lives here in Athens they’d been treated well, made to feel welcome, but recently there’d been more comments. "You’ve stolen our jobs," people would say. Sometimes it’d be a stranger, sometimes someone they knew. It might be said as though it was just a bit of fun, just something to say to fill the day’s silence. As if it didn’t really mean anything.

They’d already heard that the local Golden Dawn group was boasting about starting to clean the neighborhood, and there was a reason why the Egyptians might have been specifically targeted. When push comes to shove, Greek shoppers prefer to buy from Greek shop owners, so the Egyptians had steeply lowered their prices. It had kept them in business, but two Greek-owned local fish shops had recently closed.

Afterward, it seemed so obvious to them that this was a Golden Dawn mob that they were surprised anyone thought it needed confirming. "Until now no one was saying, ‘We’re cleaning the neighborhood,’ " Saad says, "and the moment Golden Dawn started saying that, it started happening."

Still, as they stood in the street awaiting the police, it seemed as though, for all the property damage, they had had a lucky escape.

Then they heard a sound. A cry of pain. It was coming from the rooftop of their house. And it was only then they realized that, in all the commotion, they had forgotten about Abousid.

Abousid Mobark had come to Greece five months earlier. Back in Egypt, he had his own small boat and was an expert at making and fixing fishing nets. He came here to get work on a fishing boat, make some money to send home to his wife and three young daughters. He was from the same village as the Abuhammids. But so far his trip had not gone well. There was no work. He had spent that day as he’d spent many days before it, waiting at the house, watching television, hoping to hear good news. In case no work came, he had started looking into the possibility of going to France, where he knew someone who might give him work in a restaurant. That evening, he decided it was too hot for him in the house, so at about eleven o’clock, after his prayers, he carried his linens and a bottle of water up to the roof so that he could sleep in the open air. He liked it up there. You could see the stars. He lay with his head facing the sea and fell asleep.

The Abuhammids’ house is the final one on the street, and the road rises up beside it so steeply that there is a place by a fig tree where a limber man can jump up from the road directly onto the roof. That is what the assailants did, long before anyone in the house had any idea they were under attack.

The first that Mobark knew of it, he was being beaten and kicked. He could feel wood, and he could feel steel. He was scared. He tried to open his eyes. It was like a terrible dream. He couldn’t understand it. They just kept coming at him. It went on and on and on. Maybe fifteen minutes of being pummeled while the others slept below.

He could barely speak when they found him, blood flowing from his mouth, his eyes bulging. (Saad fainted at the sight.) All Mobark said were the same words, over and over:

"They have killed me.... They have killed me.... They have killed me...."

The last thing Kasidiaris says to me on my way out of the Golden Dawn offices is that if the magazine needs a photograph of him, there’s one on his Twitter feed. The main photograph on his Twitter feed shows Kasidiaris in black leather jacket and sunglasses with what appears to be a partially destroyed Turkish flag.

Earlier I had asked him about the regular media reports of violent incidents where the suggestion was that those responsible were Golden Dawn supporters.

"The order from Golden Dawn to each member," he told me, "is not to act violently."

Twice I visit Abousid Mobark in Evangelismos Hospital.** **He is barely able to speak, because he has just had an operation replacing part of his jaw, which was broken in three places, but he gives me a thumbs-up, and we arrange to talk when he is discharged. Two weeks after the attack, we meet where he and the Abuhammids are now based, just down the coast from the house they have abandoned. (At that house, Mobark’s sleeping bag, his linens, his half-drunk bottle of water, even now lie on the roof where they were left behind when he was taken to the hospital.) Mobark can still only murmur through the side of his mouth, barely opening it, all because of the pain. He will be on liquids for another month.

"They left me when they thought I was dead," Mobark says. He is watching a Turkish soap opera, and he is wearing a T-shirt someone brought to the hospital because all of his clothing was stained with his own blood. "Even now," he says, "I cannot understand why they did that at all. Why would somebody do that?" He says that there are plenty of Greek immigrants in Egypt and nobody there does this to them. Everyone had always told him that Greeks and Egyptians were like brothers and that he would be welcomed with love. He laughs wryly. "Golden Dawn loves me," he says.

Six people have been arrested in connection with the attack, though it is not clear whether they will be prosecuted. Mobark says that he wants justice to prevail, but he has no confidence that it will. "They have killed so many people," he says, "and nobody found justice."

One can see why Mobark might believe this. In the town of Veria, for instance, eight Golden Dawn members were accused recently of assaulting the owner of a café where local leftists hung out. Charges against seven of them were dismissed because the café owner didn’t pay a one-hundred-euro court fee. The eighth was found guilty and given a four-month suspended sentence. The café owner was also given a four-month suspended sentence for using insulting language. And there is a widespread belief among people I speak with in Greece that the police turn a blind eye to, or even encourage and collaborate with, Golden Dawn members. After the election a clever statistical analysis of voting patterns in Athens strongly suggested that in some central Athens districts at least, the support for Golden Dawn among the Greek police runs at around 50 percent. (Within days, Kasidiaris was quoting this statistic with pride.)

Greek demonstrators flee violence during a protest against the severe austerity measures implemented to address the country’s ongoing economic crisis.

Mobark says that he has decided to go back to Egypt. He’s had his fill of Greece. He’d rather earn less money and live with his children. The Abuhammids have no thought of leaving. This is where they live.

Even when the world is calm and orderly, no two or three people see it exactly the same. When it breaks down, even more so. But this, according to those who were there, is the story of what happened on live television that morning.

Neither Kanelli nor Dourou had met Kasidiaris before. Dourou says she didn’t even know he would be on the program until she arrived at the TV studio. She considered walking out in protest but decided instead that she just would not address him or even look at him. Kanelli knew he was coming, and although she’d never debated anyone from his party before, she didn’t object.

As for Kasidiaris, he says that it was the first time Golden Dawn had been invited on a popular morning show of this kind. "That’s why we accepted. It was a chance to portray and represent my party and talk about our beliefs." But he claims to have been wary from the start. "The first thing I told the presenter was ‘We are not going to put on a show and fight—don’t wait for that.’ " He also claims that this is why, earlier that morning, when he’d had his normal breakfast—All-Bran—he deliberately hadn’t drunk any coffee. He didn’t want to be too hyper. Not today.

According to Kanelli, there was a surprising cordiality early on. During an ad break, they discussed guns. Kasidiaris asked her what kinds she has, and she says that they conferred "in a normal friendly way." When Kasidiaris mentioned the distribution problems his party was having with its party newspaper, congenial advice was offered. But Kanelli also claims that she already had the sense from his body language that there was something unstable about him, and adapted accordingly. "I was very calm," she says, "because I had a sense of danger."

For nearly an hour and a half nothing too unusual happened. Dourou says that while maintaining her policy of ignoring Kasidiaris, she deliberately tried to raise issues that would be on his natural agenda—the police, security, crime—and preemptively offer the left’s agenda on these subjects. Looking back, she believes this infuriated him. "He does not know how to face argument, counterargument," she says. "I feel these people are not prepared to counterargue from a woman. Don’t forget that neo-Nazi organizations, concerning a woman they think that they have to be a mother. His problem was that I’m blonde, I’m young, I’m a politician."

Kanelli says that he accused the Communist Party of paying Bangladeshi immigrants to join in demonstrations, and of collaborating with the police. She called him a fascist; he called her "a dirty communist."

Then, only a few minutes from the program’s scheduled end, things got nasty.

Kasidiaris says that he had deliberately—"in order to avoid any violent incident"—chosen a neutral topic to close on: Greece’s solar-energy resources. It seems a surprising thing to have been on his mind—that a talk show might turn violent—but there you have it. And violence prevailed anyway. The specific trigger appears to have been Dourou finally addressing a comment directly toward him. "The only thing I said was ‘What happened yesterday in the court?’ " says Dourou. Kasidiaris has been charged with hiring the car that some men used in a violent racist attack in 2007, and the case is very slowly making its way through the courts. ("I’m innocent, of course," Kasidiaris tells me in his best English.)

Kanelli remembers him hollering, "This is a personal matter!"

"He was screaming like a monster," she says.

When I ask Kasidiaris why he reacted like this, he essentially says that they should have respected this ongoing legal issue as unresolved and off-limits. But then he says something that seems far more to the point. "They were talking sarcastically," he says. "They were making fun of me."

Dourou actually said one more thing before the water was thrown: "We have a crisis in our democracy, and you know what this is about? It’s that unfortunately we have allowed such a party in the Parliament that is going to take the country back 500 years."

"I didn’t attack her for that reason," Kasidiaris insists, though he did shout out a retort to this insult the instant after throwing the water. His implication seems to be that his fury was more about the court case—he was still incensed by that. "And of course in this moment I had to react," he reasons. "It was a logical reaction. I was first being attacked, and then I reacted. I reacted in an aggressive way to an aggressive way I received."

And so the water flew.

"Maybe my action, throwing the water, was out of the limits, but I was very frustrated, very angry, and my anger at that moment was justified."

On TV, you see Dourou turn away as the water hits, then turn back and rest her chin on her hand with almost a glimmer of a smirk. She remembers that as the fractions of a second ticked by, she assessed the situation and what her reaction should be: "I took the decision: You are representing your party, your coalition. You are not Rena. You have to stay calm."

Kanelli’s view of what was happening in those instants is different. She feels as if everything stopped for two seconds. To her, Dourou was white-faced, paralyzed. Two seconds. She knows how long two seconds is in a TV studio, because she had been measuring out time in intervals like this for years. She liked to smoke in the studio, and she would know when she had two seconds to hide the cigarette before the camera came back to her. "My whole life has been seconds," she says.

She claims that she saw something else too, though it’s impossible to confirm from the footage—that when Kasidiaris put down the now empty water glass, he did so with sufficient force that it broke.

"The first feeling I have is danger," she says. "Danger. I don’t know what he is going to do. He’s out of control, screaming like a murmuring beast." Kanelli says that she asked him, "What are you doing?" She poked him with the only thing she had aside from her own water glass—a copy of the Communist Party newspaper, Rizospastis. "And when the newspaper touches him, my hand touches him, and I think he got mad. He felt pushed. And then he started—once, twice, three. It was hard. It was to kill."

Kasidiaris leaves an Athens courthouse a few days after his live-televised assault.

On TV they looked like primal, violently delivered slaps, but Kanelli says the third was a fist.

"I drew the curtain," Kanelli summarizes, "so that everybody could see the monster."

At that point the live feed went blank. Kanelli says that she was as annoyed about this as anything else—to leave an audience hanging there without information! For, as it turns out, seven minutes! She was screaming at them to go back on the air, and eventually they did—all the other guests aside from Kasidiaris—to discuss what had happened.

So Kanelli didn’t see directly what took place next off-camera, though she believes she knows the exact chain of events. That he went into the makeup room, where some of the TV people blocked the door to trap him there until the police arrived. That he started taking photographs with his cell phone through the window in the door, telling people, "I know your face—you’re dead." That he was also heard on his phone calling Golden Dawn’s leader, telling him, "Send a hundred guys here and burn the bloody station down!" That faced with this intimidation, the TV people let him go.

Kasidiaris, predictably, has a different account of most of this.

"I was hit by Kanelli first," he says, "and then I reacted to that. If she didn’t attack me, I wouldn’t have reacted."

It’s quite shocking to see a man hitting a woman.

"It is also shocking seeing a woman hitting a man. This is something out of mind."

I think you hit her a lot harder.

"That’s not true. I didn’t hit her hard."

He agrees that he was then trapped inside the makeup room. "It’s illegal," he says. "I’m an elected member of Parliament, and I’m also a citizen, and no one has the right to keep someone in a room. And in order to open the door, I used all my power."

I’ve heard two stories about what happened then. One is that you made a phone call asking for a hundred people to come and burn down the studio.

Kasidiaris smiles in a strange, lopsided way and replies in English.

"Yes, I also heard that I had the mobile and I was taking photos. My mobile doesn’t have a camera. It was an old mobile phone with no camera! It was impossible to take photos."

So why would some say that you asked a hundred people to come?

"Who said it? That’s a lie. That’s a lie."

One strange quirk of the Greek judicial system is that if you are arrested within forty-eight hours of an offense, you are taken straight to court for instant justice. But once that time has elapsed, the case slips into the regular glacially slow process, so it was in Kasidiaris’s interest to avoid the police until the deadline had elapsed. He’s quite open about the fact that he went into hiding. "I used my rights," he says. "They would have put handcuffs on me and represented a wrong image that I didn’t want."

Kasidiaris reappeared to deliver Golden Dawn’s final surreal coup de grâce: He announced that he was suing Dourou and Kanelli for deliberately provoking his actions. Astonishingly, in keeping with the nuanced reactions here to this whole chain of events, not everyone in Greece considered this absurd. It was openly debated in the Greek press whether Kasidiaris had been right or wrong, as though either alternative was quite possible. And online Kasidiaris was widely cheered. Here is a depressingly typical example:

HAHAHAHAHAHA I’ve never felt better to see a man slap a bitch! No one has ever deserved a slap more than that communist bitch cunt in history! I wish he would have knocked her teeth out like she deserved!

Kanelli, the object of the violence, compares these reactions to what happens when mass murderers are incarcerated.

"And then," she says, "the prison is filled with love letters from 15-year-old young girls."

A couple of weeks after I visit the Abuhammids, I hear from them that immigrants in the area have started finding threatening leaflets directed toward them. "We will run after you," the leaflets promise, "if you don’t leave the country...." Around this time, some Pakistani immigrants in the same neighborhood are attacked by a mob of around ten men—some, they claimed, wearing Golden Dawn T-shirts. When the police arrived, after the mob had left, they detained fourteen of the Pakistanis who had gathered, seven of whom were subsequently sentenced for being illegal immigrants.

Golden Dawn later makes news by handing out free food in Syntagma Square, right next to the Greek Parliament, but only to people who have documentation to prove that they are Greek citizens. Meanwhile one of Greece’s best athletes, a triple jumper, is thrown out of the Olympics for racist tweeting, repeating a dumb joke about immigrants and West Nile virus. An examination of her Twitter feed shows that she had previously tweeted to wish Kasidiaris well and had also re-tweeted a recent post of his. In October, I receive an e-mail from Liana Kanelli saying things are getting even worse. She asserts that there has been a horrifying escalation in Golden Dawn’s day-to-day tactics. "And yet," she writes, "they are still in the parliament screaming and shouting like Goebbels’s wolves."

Hope persists that Greece’s grim unraveling can be reversed. For its people’s sake, of course, but maybe also for ours. How sure can we be that there is anything happening today in Greece that could not also, someday not so far into the future, happen here in America? We all live in an era when global finance commonly borrows the language of infectious diseases: When a problem breaks out in one place, the wider concern is often about contagion. In times of progress and enlightenment, the slightly dippy declaration that "we are all one world" suggests some kind of incipient utopian togetherness, but when times turn bad, the same concept—we are all one world—can sound more like a threat.

Shortly before I leave Greece, there is a small story in the newspaper about two men in the north who had been arrested the previous day. They were accused of trying to steal a railway bridge. A local police officer answered my questions about this reluctantly, as though the problem wasn’t a pair of thieves with a crane being caught in the act but people like me kicking up a fuss about a bit of bridge-stealing. "It was a small bridge," he said. "Many people steal metal for the obvious reason of getting money from melting down the metal." His message was that there was nothing worth seeing here; please move on.

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